Sedulity Groups | Internet Protocol a unique identity of a Computer

What is Ip Address?
You might have come across this term very often, haven’t you! Every machine on the Internet has a unique identifying number, called an IP Address. A typical IP address looks like this: 216.27.61.137, 921.168.1.6, 59.22.1.1 etc.
What is the use of IP Address?

Let me clear this concept with the help of an example, if you want someone to visit your place what do you do? Tell that person your address don’t you. Similarly what will you do if you want to reach someone over a similar or different network over a computer system. You need some mechanism to address difference computers so that they can communicate with each other or information sharing is possible between two computers. To make this information sharing over computers possible, we need IP Address.
An IP address is just like an online address of a computer. It is used to refer to a computer over a network which makes it possible to address that computer uniquely over the network
To make it easier for us humans to remember, IP addresses are normally expressed in decimal format as a “dotted decimal number” like the one above. But computers communicate in binary form. Look at the same IP address in binary:
11011000.00011011.00111101.10001001
The four numbers in an IP address are called octets, because they each have eight positions when viewed in binary form. If you add all the positions together, you get 32, which is why IP addresses are considered 32-bit numbers. Since each of the eight positions can have two different states (1 or 0) the total number of possible combinations per octet is 28 or 256. So each octet can contain any value between 0 and 255. Combine the four octets and you get 232 or a possible 4,294,967,296 unique values!
Out of the almost 4.3 billion possible combinations, certain values are restricted from use as typical IP addresses. For example, the IP address 0.0.0.0 is reserved for the default network and the address 255.255.255.255 is used for broadcasts.
Now you might be thinking – What is my Ip Address.
Finding your IP address is really simple, just visit http://whatismyip.com and it will display your IP address along with the other important information like your geographic location, Internet provider etc